The Hebrew word behind loving kindness, steadfast love and mercy, and why no one English word will do
Hesed: Love That Keeps Its Word
It is in the Bible some two hundred and fifty times. The King James gives it fourteen different English words. The Psalms cannot stop saying it, Hosea says God wants it more than sacrifice, and a Moabite widow is praised for it. Whatever it is, it is not a feeling.
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Lesson 1 of 12 · Hebrew
Hesed is love that has bound itself and keeps its word: loyalty inside a relationship, shown in acts, owed rather than merely felt. It is what God shows a people he has covenanted with, what Ruth shows Naomi, what a king shows the family of a dead friend. English has no word for it, which is why your Bible says loving kindness in one verse, mercy in the next and steadfast love in a third, all for the same four Hebrew letters. Read any of those words in the Old Testament and ask whether hesed stands behind it; if it does, the verse is about faithfulness, not about a mood.
Where God describes himself
When Moses asks to see God’s glory, what he is given is a description spoken aloud, and the word is at the centre of it.
Yahweh passed by before him, and proclaimed, “Yahweh! Yahweh, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth, keeping loving kindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and disobedience and sin; and who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the children’s children, on the third and on the fourth generation.” — Exodus 34:6–7 · WEB
Read the comment on The Name Proclaimed
Abundant in loving kindness, keeping loving kindness for thousands: the same word twice, the second time paired with keeping, which is the clue to it. This sentence is the Old Testament’s most-quoted description of God, echoed in Numbers, Nehemiah, the Psalms, Joel and Jonah, and every echo carries the word. Whatever the Old Testament means by God’s love, this is where it defines the term.
חֵסֵד chêçêd H2617
from חָסַד; kindness; by implication (towards God) piety; rarely (by opposition) reproof, or (subject.) beauty; favour, good deed(-liness, -ness), kindly, (loving-) kindness, merciful (kindness), mercy, pity, reproach, wicked thing.
The dictionary range is wide because the thing is: kindness, favor, goodness, mercy, loyalty, devotion. What holds the range together is that hesed is always shown by one party to another inside a bond that already exists — a covenant, a marriage, a kinship, a friendship — and is always an act, not a disposition. It is what you do for someone because of what you are to them. The rabbis called it the foundation of the world; the translators of 1611 gave up on one word and used fourteen.
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The refrain that will not stop
Psalm 136 says one thing twenty-six times, and the thing it says is this word.
Give thanks to Yahweh, for he is good, for his loving kindness endures forever. — Psalm 136:1 · WEB
Read the comment on His Loving Kindness Endures Forever
For his loving kindness endures forever, after every line, through creation, the exodus, the wilderness and the conquest. The point of the repetition is the point of the word: it does not run out, because it is not a feeling that comes and goes but a commitment that holds. The Psalms use hesed more than any other book, well over a hundred times, and nearly always about God, and nearly always as the reason a psalmist dares to pray at all.
“Surely goodness and loving kindness shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in Yahweh’s house forever.” Psalm 23:6 · WEB
Goodness and loving kindness following a man all his days: hesed as pursuit.
“It is because of Yahweh’s loving kindnesses that we are not consumed, because his mercies don’t fail.” Lamentations 3:22 · WEB
The reason a ruined city is not consumed, said in the middle of its ruin.
“Have mercy on me, God, according to your loving kindness. According to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions.” Psalm 51:1 · WEB
The first word of the great confession: not "I am sorry" but "according to your loving kindness."
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What God wants instead of sacrifice
Hosea puts the word into the sentence Jesus later quoted twice.
For I desire mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings. — Hosea 6:6 · WEB
Read the comment on I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice
Mercy, not sacrifice, in nearly every English Bible, the WEB included, and the word under mercy is hesed. The prophet is not against worship. He is saying that God wants from Israel what God shows Israel, loyalty inside the bond, and that ritual without it is worthless. When Jesus tells the Pharisees to go and learn what this means (Matthew 9:13), he is sending them to a Hebrew word they knew perfectly well, and to the difference between a duty performed and a relationship kept.
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A Moabite shows Israel what it means
The word is not only God’s. The book of Ruth is a story about hesed between people, and the one who shows it is a foreigner.
“Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go, return each of you to her mother’s house. May Yahweh deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me.” Ruth 1:8 · WEB
Naomi asks God to deal kindly with her daughters-in-law as they have dealt with the dead and with her: hesed between women in a house of grief.
“Naomi said to her daughter-in-law, “May he be blessed by Yahweh, who has not abandoned his kindness to the living and to the dead.” Naomi said to her, “The man is a close relative to us, one of our near kinsmen.”” Ruth 2:20 · WEB
Boaz has not stopped his kindness to the living and the dead: hesed as a family obligation kept past death.
“David said, “Is there yet any who is left of Saul’s house, that I may show him kindness for Jonathan’s sake?”” 2 Samuel 9:1 · WEB
David asks whether anyone of Saul’s house is left, that he may show him kindness for Jonathan’s sake: hesed as a promise outliving the man it was made to.
Every one of those is an act done because of a bond, at a cost, when it would have been easy not to. That is the word’s human face, and it is the same word as Exodus 34.
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The translators’ problem, and yours
Here the honest difficulty. Mercy suggests pardon; loving kindness suggests warmth; steadfast love suggests constancy; loyalty suggests duty. Hesed is all four and none alone, and every English choice loses two of them. The translators of the WEB chose loving kindness nearly everywhere, which keeps the warmth and the constancy and loses the sense of obligation; the King James chose mercy most often, which keeps the pardon and loses the bond. This is not carelessness on anyone’s part. It is a word English does not have. Open Psalm 136 in the comparative view and read the refrain in four translations; the differences are the word’s range showing through.
What the word asks of you is what it asks of Israel: that love be a thing you do because of what you have bound yourself to, and that it hold when the feeling does not.
Find a verse you know with mercy or loving kindness in it and check, in the interlinear, whether the word is hesed. If it is, rewrite the verse in your own words with "loyal love" or "kept promise" in the word’s place, and say what changed.
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